Wednesday, September 5, 2012

One Body, available for pre-orders

One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics is now available for pre-orders from Amazon. It's not looking like a Kindle version will be available at release time (the press says they need to formulate policies first--that sounds like a long time), but one will be able to buy a pdf version from the press, and then presumably put that on a Kindle.

I don't have an exact release date, but it is in the press's fall catalog, and I have two or three weeks left to correct galleys and do an index.

Here's a copy of the blurb:

This important philosophical reflection on love and sexuality from a broadly Christian perspective is aimed at philosophers, theologians, and educated Christian readers. Alexander R. Pruss focuses on foundational questions on the nature of romantic love and on controversial questions in sexual ethics on the basis of the fundamental idea that romantic love pursues union of two persons as one body.

One Body begins with an account, inspired by St. Thomas Aquinas, of the general nature of love as constituted by components of goodwill, appreciation, and unitiveness. Different forms of love, such as parental, collegial, filial, friendly, fraternal, or romantic, Pruss argues, differ primarily not in terms of goodwill or appreciation but in terms of the kind of union that is sought. Pruss examines romantic love as distinguished from other kinds of love by a focus on a particular kind of union, a deep union as one body achieved through the joint biological striving of the sort involved in reproduction. Taking the account of the union that romantic love seeks as a foundation, the book considers the nature of marriage and applies its account to controversial ethical questions, such as the connection between love, sex, and commitment and the moral issues involving contraception, same-sex activity, and reproductive technology. With philosophical rigor and sophistication, Pruss provides carefully argued answers to controversial questions in Christian sexual ethics.

"This is a terrific—really quite extraordinary—work of scholarship. It is quite simply the best work on Christian sexual ethics that I have seen. It will become the text that anyone who ventures into the field will have to grapple with—a kind of touchstone. Moreover, it is filled with arguments with which even secular writers on sexual morality will have to engage and come to terms." —Robert P. George

12 comments:

You need a new publisher if they still haven't formulated policies about selling books digitally. Kindles have been around since 2007 and iBooks since 2010. Their success (and by extension yours) in their changing industry depends on their ability to sell your content in at least one of the leading stores. If they cannot or will take too long to arrange this, interest in your work looses momentum (and possibly relevance) and your effort wasted.

While I've got my fingers in a knot, PDFs are not an appropriate solution because they are tedious to put on a reading device and lead to questions such as "how do re-download a PDF I previous bought?"

Having said all this, I am really really REALLY keen to read this book. It is very exciting!

It's not very hard to put a PDF on a Kindle, though PDF viewing on eink Kindles is not great.

On an eink Kindle, you just copy it to the same directory that other books go. But I know that a lot of people like to download books directly to the device. (The one eink Kindle we have, all books are downloaded like this via USB, as it's my daughter's and we don't want it hooked up to WiFi.)

On a Fire, you should be able to download it with the browser, and as long as you have installed a PDF viewer (I use APV Pro, which I am a co-author of), it should open. Would be good to eventually move it out of the Download directory.

That said, I realize this is not a happy solution. But what can I do, besides nag the press, which I am doing (at one point I even offered to sell the book myself in Kindle format and share profits).

I signed the contract around 2005 or 2006, when I was one of a small minority of people who read ebooks.

I hope this book does a lot of good out there. Heaven knows there are a lot of people who are messed up when it comes to understanding what love is and what the role of sex is. I have some otherwise good friends and cco-workers like this. Hard to blame these people though when you see the garbage that society as a whole has been fed for the past 4 decades (Perhaps longer if you count Kinsey's questionable work. That would make it more like 5 to 6 decades!). I hope this book gives the right perspective to the right people. Hang in there and again good luck and prayers.

Aargh... The script is throwing up some mismatched entries. (I mark the text to be indexed with {{index heading:}} ... {{:index heading}}, and I used macros to generate these, but sometimes I did some manual adjustments.)

"Alexander Pruss here develops sound and humane answers to the whole range of main questions about human sexual and reproductive choices. His principal argument for the key answers is very different from the one I have articulated over the past fourteen years. But his argumentation is at every point attractively direct, careful, energetic in framing and responding to objections, and admirably attentive to realities and the human goods at stake." —John Finnis, University of Oxford

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I am a philosopher at Baylor University. This blog, however, does not purport to express in any way the opinions of Baylor University. Amateur science and technology work should not be taken to be approved by Baylor University. Use all information at your own risk.